Part one of two
There's a disturbing and not-so-subtle racism beneath all of the hot and bothered reaction to the issue of temporary foreign workers in "our" midst.
"Our" is shorthand for Canadians who are already here and preferably born here. Looking "other," as in not white or First Nations, is fine, so long as the accent isn't too thick.
It's easy to expose how ridiculous and racist this line of thought is.
The only way to single out a "foreign worker" without asking them for their birth certificate or their passport is to identify them by how they look or how they sound and then discriminate accordingly. If that's not racist, then what the heck is?
The outrage over RBC letting go of good Canadians to farm out the work to foreign workers or bringing in Chinese miners to work in a coal mine in Tumbler Ridge is dishonest and ignorant of past and present realities.
The dishonesty is part of a refusal to accept Canada's multiculturalism and how that is changing the country. Whites are expected to be in the minority in Vancouver by 2031, according to news coverage of a recent report, to no surprise of the white British Columbians who have used the racist nickname "Hong-couver" for years.
There are parts of Richmond where shops only have signs in Chinese. The same people appalled at Quebec's infamous Bill 101, which insists that all public signs be either exclusively or predominately French, took a petition to Richmond city council last month, demanding those Chinese signs include English or French. Thankfully, the mayor and council there filed that petition in the round file where it belongs.
Temporary foreign workers are everywhere in Canada. A huge part of the workforce during ski season in Whistler doesn't hold a Canadian passport. Same goes for the farm workers in the Fraser Valley and, increasingly, in the Okanagan Valley. With more than 330,000 temporary foreign workers across Canada, according to the CBC, the Canadian economy would take a serious hit without them here.
On the flip side, there are tens of thousands of Canadians currently working in other countries, gaining valuable international experience while contributing to the prosperity of their host country.
And foreign workers have been in Canada since before Confederation. A Barkerville exhibit returns to B.C. next week after a six-week tour of China. Chinese workers played a huge role in the development of Barkerville and the entire Cariboo.
The Canadian Pacific Railway, completed in 1885 to link the Pacific with Eastern Canada to keep B.C. and the western territories from being seized by the United States, couldn't have been built without the literal blood, sweat and tears of Chinese workers. About 1,000 of those workers died building the CPR, Prime Minister Stephen Harper accurately noted during his formal apology in 2006 to Chinese Canadians for the head tax and other racist policies implemented on Chinese citizens for much of Canada's history.
Sadly, the prime minister saying sorry only addresses the regulatory discrimination.
The racism at its root is alive and well.
Tomorrow: How about that new Brad Paisley song?
